Maybe someone here can provide some insight on this.
A family member has a Motorola Canopy radio on a wood pole for fixed wireless Internet. It's about 20 feet up the pole. Direct bury CAT5 cable connects to it, goes down the pole, into the ground for about
100 feet to the house. Inside the house, the cable changes to interior CAT5 but goes straight to a computer.The CAT5 has a copper shield on it, but it isn't connected to anything.
So far, two Ethernet cards have failed. In both cases, they failed during winter storms in which there was no lightning, but a lot of wind. They also get thunderstorms during the summer, but this hasn't caused any problems. The first time I thought a power outage caused it. Another outage failed the video card, so I suggested a UPS and they now have one.
However, when this last Ethernet card failed there were no power problems. I'm starting to think that maybe the wind is causing static buildup on the pole cable. How probable is that? How much would grounding the CAT5 shield help? It shouldn't hurt; I had intended on grounding it initially but for some reason didn't. I looked into Ethernet surge suppressors and that's an option, but I'd like to try and understand as much as possible about this problem first.
Even though the computer has integrated Ethernet, I installed an add- in card we had in case this happens again. I'd rather destroy a cheap NIC than something on the main board.